Think of an economy where people could be an artist or a photographer or a writer without worrying about keeping their day job in order to have health insurance.

As musicians and artists it's important we have an environment - and I guess when I say environment I really mean the industry that really nurtures these gifts. Oftentimes the machine can overlook the need to take care of the people who produce the sounds that have a lot to do with the health and well-being of society.

Sadness is a very interesting idea this idea of sadness being some kind of default setting that artists will go into. And then I started thinking about this idea of sadness and happiness and the idea that sadness is very loud and happiness is quiet.

The pop musicians often leave meaning in the dust and substitute it for cartoons. The deeper artists - the grunge artists in the world and the emoticon people - tend to leave all of the happiness out of life like it just doesn't exist.

The mindset of chasing that next #1 record doesn't exist for me anymore. It's more about being a well-rounded entertainer than being a pop artist. Obviously it would be wonderful to have a hit record but I don't base my happiness on that anymore. It's about the accomplishment of a project that satisfies me. I just want to enjoy the ride.

Nobody I think ought to read poetry or look at pictures or statues who cannot find a great deal more in them than the poet or artist has actually expressed. Their highest merit is suggestiveness.

A great book provides escapism for me. The artistry and the creativity in a story are better than any drugs.

I am a leader. Leaders always get heat. They're always going against the grain. Jimi Hendrix got heat Bob Marley got heat Miles Davis got heat. Every great artist got heat. Heat means you're doing something right.

The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy only the artist the great artist knows how difficult it is.

Any great warrior is also a scholar and a poet and an artist.

What distinguishes a great artist from a weak one is first their sensibility and tenderness second their imagination and third their industry.

The man who throws a bomb is an artist because he prefers a great moment to everything.

The difference between a bad artist and a good one is: the bad artist seems to copy a great deal the good one really does.

A great artist is a great man in a great child.

I have come to believe that a great teacher is a great artist and that there are as few as there are any other great artists. Teaching might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit.

As an artist I have an even more abiding interest in the compact between the Arts and Government.

A good artist should be isolated. If he isn't isolated something is wrong.

That terrible mood of depression of whether it's any good or not is what is known as The Artist's Reward.

Good artists copy great artists steal.

The artist must be in his work as God is in creation invisible and all-powerful one must sense him everywhere but never see him.

It is the artist who realizes that there is a supreme force above him and works gladly away as a small apprentice under God's heaven.

God is really only another artist. He invented the giraffe the elephant and the cat. He has no real style He just goes on trying other things.

A garden is a complex of aesthetic and plastic intentions and the plant is to a landscape artist not only a plant - rare unusual ordinary or doomed to disappearance - but it is also a color a shape a volume or an arabesque in itself.

There's no artist in this world that doesn't enjoy the dream that if they have bad reviews now the story of Keats can redeem them in their fantasy or imagination in the future. I think Keats' poem 'Endymion' is a really difficult poem and I'm not surprised that a lot of people pulled it apart in a way.